Unfortunately, I also had to miss class on the day of the Chelsea expedition, so this was another trip I took on by myself.  Upon my walk along 22nd Street to street to see my first gallery in the area, Pace Wildenstein, I was immediately conscious of my surroundings.  Though we had visited several other areas with a high concentration of galleries, none of them quite compared to this.  I was surprised to find that nearly every door on 22nd Street, as well on all of the other street I walked down (24th, 25th and 26th) between 10th and 11th Avenue was the entrance to an art gallery.  Some of them were even the entrances to several galleries!  There weren’t even trendy boutiques or restaurants, which seem to be popular in all of the other gallery-concentrated areas I’ve visited; what wasn’t a gallery was almost always a garage or parking lot.
            The exhibition on view at the 22nd street Pace Wildenstein gallery was Alex Katz: The Sixties, which was a collection of paintings created by the artist during, no surprise, the sixties.  The majority of these paintings were of people, and my initial reaction was that they all seemed to have somewhat blank expressions.  However after looking closer at the paintings, the facial expressions appeared to be not blank but rather extremely subtle, and it was these subtleties that gave the paintings that much more depth.  My favorite piece was "One Flight Up," an array of 38 head shot-like portraits, arranged in a rectangular shape such that approximately half of them were facing one direction and half the other.  Since both the faces and the backs of the heads were painted, the work had two unique viewpoints.
            The Pace Wildenstein Gallery on 25th Street was showing Dubuffet and Basquiat: Personal Histories, which was also a collection of paintings by the two artists.  However these paintings were much more abstract than those of the 22nd Street gallery, and thus the show had an extremely different feel to it.  It is often important for galleries to show a range of different types of works and exhibitions, and due to Pace Wildenstein’s multiple locations, this can even be done simultaneously.
            Mary Boone's galleries can also do this, arguably to an even greater extent due two having locations in two distinct areas.  Visiting Mary Boone in Chelsea was quite different from visiting the gallery on 5th Avenue because these two neighborhoods have such different feels to them.  The 5th Avenue one seems much more chic, located in an area full of upscale buildings and designer stores.  Chelsea, on the other hand, developed out of a run-down neighborhood full of crime, and interspersed instead with garages which are reminiscent of its history.  Because of the diversity in these locations, each gallery can be catered to a specific audience.
            I also visited an exhibition of Bill Henson's photographs at the Robert Miller Gallery, which I found to be particularly entrancing.  The first quality of the photographs, other than their giant size, was the coloring.  Almost all of the works were maybe 75% nearly solid black.  Because of this, attention was immediately drawn to what wasn’t black.  In many cases, this was a portion of a human body or bodies.  Unlike Alex Katz’s paintings, the faces in these photographs practically screamed with emotion.  The majority of the people in these photographs were young women, and they came across to me as extremely vulnerable, no doubt due in large part to the lighting, or lack thereof.  There was something about these photographs that made want to know their subjects and understand what they were feeling and why.  The darkness made them eerily captivating.